and bones vanished, leaving a simple tent.
Taking off his hat, Danma entered the tent, where the air was filled with a heavy fragrance, though not a flower was in sight. Joru did not speak; he just smiled. Enlightened by the will of Heaven, Danma fell to his knees, pledging eternal fealty to the boy. Thus Danma became King Gesar’s first vassal, many years before Joru became king.
‘The barbarians will come to their senses,’ Joru said. ‘In order that they will come to believe in their future enlightenment, we must make them regret what they did to me today.’ He waved Danma forward and whispered to him what he must do.
Danma returned to the steward’s fortress. Following Joru’s instructions, he told everyone that the boy was a yaksha incarnate, a nature-spirit.
Khrothung directed the troops of his tribe to force the boy into exile.
‘There is no need to use force,’ the old steward said. ‘Just send a hundred women, each with two handfuls of ashes, reciting incantations and spreading the ashes. The boy will have to go to the place of exile.’
Gyatsa Zhakar, knowing that this was a vile and very strong curse, pleaded for his brother: ‘Joru is a descendant of my tribe, the grandson of the Dragon tribe. Please use a hundred handfuls of fried flour instead of the ashes.’
Joru and his mother had readied themselves. Wearing the hideous leather robe that his mother had made, Joru sat on his stick, like a simpleton, leering at the pretty Brugmo. She threw grey-white fried flour over his face. In contrast with her son’s ugliness, Metog Lhartse was exceptionally beautiful that day. She put every other girl to shame. Jewels from the Dragon fortress seemed even more radiant beside her. Sitting upright on her snowy horse, she glowed like the early-morning sun.
The people marvelled at her beauty, as if they had discovered it for the first time, and the sight of her sweet face sent hot tears to their eyes. ‘Glingkar is so vast and yet there is no place for this mother and son,’ they lamented. ‘How pitiful they look!’ And they blamed others for the boy’s fate.
Gyatsa Zhakar had returned home for provisions, which he loaded onto his horse. Taking his younger brother by the hand, he said, ‘Let us go.’ Mother and son mounted their horses.
The sighs over their fate faded before they had taken a hundred steps, and the women again spread the flour and spat such curses at the three travellers that deities flew out of Heaven to block them. Eventually, Joru told his brother to turn back. He wept as he watched him retreat.
Joru felt truly alone. Deities and the local mountain gods had been ordered to protect him, but he could not see them.
The Story Tea Leaves
Joru and his mother rode until they reached the broad banks of the winding Yellow river, where nothing grew except a profusion of reeds on the flood plain, so tall that only the powerful shoulders and alert ears of their horses were visible. Joru told his mother that this should be where they built their new home. When she complained that the place had no name, the mountain god responded with a roar of thunder that it had once been called Yulung Kulha Sumdo, but the demons had released moles that burrowed underground, criss-crossing the land with tunnels. When the pasture grass reached down with its roots, it grasped nothing but black emptiness. That autumn, as the moles destroyed the link between the earth and the vegetation, the surviving clumps of grass decided not to grow the following year. They entrusted what few seeds they had to the wind, which would take them to a far-off place where they could put down roots.
So, the autumn wind took the seeds of fescue, wild green onion, sow-thistle and wild lilies, with the promise that one day it would bring back seeds.
The grass had left, followed by the people.
By the time Joru and his mother arrived, the moles had built a kingdom of their own, with two kings and nearly a hundred officials. When Joru decided to destroy the kingdom, his mother was worried. ‘Since it is only the two of us, the people of Glingkar cannot condemn you for killing again but, my son, the gods in Heaven see everything.’
Gazing up at the sky, Joru mused that if Heaven could see everything, the people of Glingkar would not have mistreated him, and his mother would not have suffered because he was her son. So he said, ‘Mother, I have long tasted the bitterness of wandering. Now I want to help those who were banished by the mole demons to return to their land.’
His words hung in the air as he transformed himself into a hawk and flew up into the blue sky. Below him lay a vast, open valley and a river with enough swirling water to make a beautiful bend. A dozen or so towering peaks gathered at the valley, which, as Master Lotus had predicted, was the place where the Gling tribe would rise to form a nation.
As the hawk rose, panic tore through the mole kingdom. The kings sent for their ministers and counsellors to form a strategic plan. One of the counsellors had already discovered that the hawk was Joru, banished from Glingkar. ‘He has magical powers, but was exiled here because he killed in a frenzy,’ the counsellor said.
‘It matters not how he got here,’ one of the kings said impatiently. ‘All that matters is how we shall avoid calamity.’
‘The king must order all the moles back from their tunnels. There are tens of thousands of us, occupying every hill around the underground palace, and I am sure he would not dare kill us all.’
But the hawk heard their words, and, pulling its wings back, it changed into a giant warrior, who picked up a hill and dropped it onto the palace, crushing the kings and officials to powder and burying the moles in their underground tunnels.
Then the wind blew back the grass seeds, the seeds of azaleas, giant cypress and birch. And there were seeds of rosemary, too, with its dusty blue flowers. It took only a single night and a fine drizzle for the seeds to sprout, and on the third day, before the palisade around the tent was finished, flowers were blooming across the grassland. People who had left but had not yet settled elsewhere returned with their cattle and sheep from all points of the compass.
To these people Joru was a king, but he wanted them to feel it in their hearts, not to call him king or make ceremonial bows. ‘I am less a king than a favour from Heaven,’ he told them. ‘And I want to bestow upon you more favours on Heaven’s behalf.’
He thought he sounded like a king.
The people looked up at him and said, ‘Great King, what could be greater than that which you have already given us?’
‘Yulung Kulha Sumdo will become the centre of a world, and the roads that are closed will link with all other places in the world.’
An elder raised a question that was on everyone’s mind: ‘Great King, why is it the centre of a world and not the centre of all the worlds?’
He wanted to tell them that the place where the black-haired Tibetans lived was indeed not the only world, that there were other worlds under Heaven. But he did not want to confuse them, so he turned away to explore the lands to the east, the west, the north and the south, quickly identifying the paths that would lead other worlds to his. The snow-capped peaks in the south were too close together, so he summoned the mountain gods and asked them to move their roots, to open a wide pass between them.
One by one, merchants following the trade winds took the road. Rain came with the warm winds from the south, bringing life to the wild fields. Lakes formed in low-lying areas, providing water for untended oxen and sheep. Tigers, leopards, jackals and wolves mingled among them, so the timid deer had to keep
